Timothy Pickering

Timothy Pickering (17 July 1745-29 January 1829) was the US Postmaster General from 12 August 1791 to 1 January 1795 (succeeding Samuel Osgood and preceding Joseph Habersham), Secretary of War from 2 January 1795 to 27 January 1796 (succeeding Henry Knox and preceding James McHenry), Secretary of State from 20 August 1795 to 12 May 1800 (succeeding Edmund Randolph and preceding John Marshall), US Senator from Massachusetts from 4 March 1803 to 3 March 1811 (succeeding Dwight Foster and preceding Joseph Bradley Varnum), and a member of the US House of Representatives from Massachusetts' 3rd district from 4 March 1813 to 3 March 1815 (succeeding Leonard White and preceding Jeremiah Nelson) and from the 2nd district from 4 March 1815 to 3 March 1817 (succeeding William Reed and preceding Nathaniel Silsbee). He was a member of the Federalist Party.

Biography
Timothy Pickering was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1745, and he began a legal career after graduating from Harvard University. He won election to the Massachusetts General Court and served as a county judge, and he also became a militia officer and led troops at the Siege of Boston. In 1777, George Washington named him Adjutant General, and he became Quartermaster General in August 1780. After the war, he moved to the Wyoming Valley and took part in Pennsylvania's 1787 ratifying convention for the US Constitution. In 1791, President Washington appointed Pickering to the position of Postmaster General, and he also served as Secretary of War and as Secretary of State. He remained in that office after President John Adams was inaugurated, and he favored close relations with Great Britain; his opposition to peace with France during the Quasi-War led to Adams dismissing him in 1800. In 1803, Pickering would be elected to the US Senate from Massachusetts, and he was an ardent opponent of the Embargo Act of 1807, and he argued that, during the Napoleonic Wars, Britain was "the world's last hope." He left the Senate in 1811 and served in the US House of Representatives from 1813 to 1817, and he became a leader of the New England secession movement during the War of 1812 due to his staunch opposition to war with Britain. The fallout from the Hartford Convention ended Pickering's career, and he lived as a farmer in Salem until his death in 1829.